What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

WHAT PAINTING IS 111
spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes,
and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint,
troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left
naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags,
is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and
clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose,
where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop
short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course,
the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp
Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura.
Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery
paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the
eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments—
Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna—covering everything underneath.
The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows
between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate
pupils.
There is no limit to this kind of description, because
Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It
is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can
happen between water and stone, than the other examples in this
book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of
qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy,
watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor
water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on
me when I look at this paint have very little to do with the
underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are
thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the
glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts.
I want to wash my face.
This is how substances occupy the mind: they congeal it into
their own image. The painter’s face becomes a portrait of the
substances that filled his mind.
For the alchemists all this was usually terribly literal. They
often wanted to eat what they had made, as if the ingestion
would transport the qualities into their bodies where meditation
would not. Edible gold was a common goal. Some recipes are
genuinely edible, even if they wouldn’t be good for you (there
are mixtures of gold and honey, and gold and salt). Others are
poisonous. Joseph Du Chesne, a late sixteenth century physician
and alchemist, tells how to make edible gold by pouring blue